Snow White Must Die (Bodenstein & Kirchhoff, #4)(29)
“Gregor.” The male voice had an urgent tone. “If you’re home, please pick up. It’s extremely important!”
Lauterbach hesitated for a moment. He knew that voice. Everything seemed to be extremely important all the time. But finally he sighed and picked up the receiver. The caller wasted no time in pleasantries. As Lauterbach listened, he could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He straightened up involuntarily. A feeling of foreboding attacked him as suddenly as a raptor.
“Thanks for calling,” he said in a hoarse voice and hung up. He stood there as if paralyzed in the dim light. A skeleton in Eschborn. Tobias Sartorius back in Altenhain. His mother had been pushed off a bridge by an unknown assailant. And a zealous officer from K-11 in Hofheim was rummaging through old files. Damn. The expensive whisky took on a bitter taste. He carelessly put down the glass and hurried upstairs to his bedroom. It might not mean anything. It could all be a coincidence, he tried to reassure himself. But in vain.
Lauterbach sat down on the bed, took off his shoes, and fell back onto the covers. A torrent of unwelcome images rushed through his head. How could a single insignificant error in judgment have produced such catastrophic repercussions? He closed his eyes. Exhaustion crept through his body. His thoughts slipped from the present along tangled paths into the world of dreams and memories. White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony …
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
“The skeleton is that of a girl who at the time of death was between fifteen and eighteen years old.” Dr. Henning Kirchhoff was in a hurry. He had to catch a plane to London, where he was expected to testify as an expert witness at a criminal trial. Bodenstein was sitting in a chair in front of the ME’s desk, listening as Dr. Kirchhoff packed the necessary documents in his briefcase and held forth on fused basilar sutures, partially fused iliac crests, and other indicators of aging.
“How long has she been inside the tank?” Bodenstein interrupted him at last.
“Ten to fifteen years max.” The medical examiner stepped over to the light box and tapped on one of the X-rays. “She once had a broken arm. You can clearly see a healed fracture here.”
Bodenstein stared at the photo. The bones glowed white against the black background.
“Ah yes, and there’s something else that’s very interesting…” Dr. Kirchhoff wasn’t the sort of person to blurt out the information. Even when pressed for time he was still able to make his report suspenseful. He looked through a few X-rays, holding them up against the light of the box, and then hung up the one he wanted next to the negative of the humerus. “The first bicuspids on the right and left side of the upper jaw had been extracted, probably because her jaw was too small.”
“And what does that mean?”
“That we saved your people some work.” Dr. Kirchhoff fixed Bodenstein with his gaze. “That is, when we correlated the dental chart data in the computer with the list of missing women, we got a match. The girl was reported missing in 1997. We also compared our X-rays with antemortem X-rays of the missing girl—and look here…,” he said, hanging another negative on the light box, “here we have the fracture when it was still relatively fresh.”
Bodenstein was growing impatient, but it suddenly dawned on him who it was that the workman at the old airfield in Eschborn had happened to dig up. Ostermann had made up a list of girls and young women who had disappeared in the past fifteen years and were never found. At the top stood the names of the two girls that Tobias Sartorius had murdered.
“Since there are no other organic materials available,” Dr. Kirchhoff went on, “sequencing was impossible, but we were able to extract the mitochondrial DNA and got a second hit. As far as the girl from the tank is concerned, she’s…”
He stopped talking, went around his desk, and rummaged through one of the many mountains of documents.
“Laura Wagner or Stefanie Schneeberger,” Bodenstein surmised. Dr. Kirchhoff looked up with a peeved smile.
“You’re a spoilsport, Bodenstein,” he said. “Just for jumping the gun like that and messing up my story, I ought to keep you in suspense until I get back from London. But since you’re kind enough to drive me to the S-Bahn station in this awful weather, I’ll tell you on the way which one the skeleton belongs to.”
* * *
Pia Kirchhoff was sitting at her desk, brooding. She had stayed up late the night before studying the files and had stumbled upon several inconsistencies. The facts in the Tobias Sartorius case were clear, the evidence against him unambiguous at first glance. Yet when she read the transcripts of the interviews, Pia couldn’t help thinking of questions to which she found no answers. Tobias Sartorius had been twenty years old when he was sentenced to the most severe punishment under juvenile criminal law for the manslaughter of then seventeen-year-old Stefanie Schneeberger and the murder of Laura Wagner, also seventeen. A neighbor had witnessed the two girls entering the house of the Sartorius family within a few minutes of each other late in the evening of September 6, 1997. Tobias and his ex-girlfriend Laura Wagner had already had a loud argument out on the street. Before that all three had been at the fair where, according to witnesses, they had consumed considerable quantities of alcohol. The court had found Tobias guilty of killing his girlfriend Stefanie Schneeberger in the heat of the moment with a tire iron. He had then killed his ex-girlfriend Laura, who had witnessed the crime. Judging by the amount of Laura’s blood found everywhere in the house, on Tobias’s clothes, and in the trunk of the car, the murder must have been committed with extreme brutality. Clear indications of a gruesome killing had then been concealed. In a search of the property, Stefanie’s backpack was found in Tobias’s room; Laura’s necklace was in the milk room under the sink; and finally the murder weapon, the tire iron, was discovered in the cesspool behind the cow stalls. The defense argument that after the altercation Stefanie had forgotten her backpack in her boyfriend’s room was dismissed as irrelevant. Later, shortly after 11:00 P.M., witnesses had seen Tobias driving out of Altenhain in his car. But around 11:45 his friends J?rg Richter and Felix Pietsch said they had spoken with him at his front door! They said he was covered in blood and refused to come back to the fair with them.